Product Description

Containing the ideas, practices, and histories of a group of Silicon Valley VP's, directors and CTO's with more than 400 man-years of experience running engineering teams in Silicon Valley, this book contains everything you need to know to successfully run a hi-tech engineering organization. Honest and comprehensive, this book will save you time and pain in dealing with people, technical and business issues. This book covers the topics you need to know to get the job done right. It's what we would have wanted to know the day we took the job! You will learn how to develop your career as a senior technical leader, and how the job evolves from a startup to an established organization, including the challenges of very rapid growth. The book looks at all components of the complete product development lifecycle, from product planning to development to support, giving practical advice for the leader as to what to do in each phase. It looks at team leadership, dynamics and development, with topics ranging from developing team culture to meeting management to personnel development, as well as dealing with difficult situations. The difficult challenges of build-versus-buy decisions, offshore and outsourced development are also reviewed. Finally the connections of the engineering leader to the other executives and teams in the company are studied. Each chapter is illustrated with real life examples. The focus throughout is on realism - illustrating successes as well as problems and challenges, especially the kind of daily life situations that you only learn on the job. All in all, in this book, you will find an overview all the major topics anyone running an engineering organization is likely to face!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1043445 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 472 pages

Review
A must read for all engineers who wish to have a successful management career. or. The book offers deep and critical insights into why many engineers do not succeed as managers. A practical guide to a successful management career in engineering driven companies. -- Rajiv Lal, Harvard Business School

If you're looking to make the career jump from Engineer to Engineering manager, this book provides a toolkit that will let you learn from some of the top Engineering VPs and CTOs in Silicon Valley. There are lots of books about management and lots of books about software engineering, but this is the only book that teaches you how to become a great leader in an engineering organization. --Zack Urlocker, VP Database Products, Sun Microsystems

Review
A must read for all engineers who wish to have a successful management career. or. The book offers deep and critical insights into why many engineers do not succeed as managers. A practical guide to a successful management career in engineering driven companies.

Customer Reviews

Excellent (and practical) guide to Engineering Management
This is a first of a kind book. Written by a cohort of authors that have successfully made the transition from engineering to executive leadership, it's been eye opening to read the examples and advice. I certainly wish this book had been around when I first made the switch from individual technical contributor to manager. Recommend it highly!

Great lessons about technology, management, and organizations
Thomas Hempel and team do a great job of giving new and old technology leaders lessons on management, technology, and organizational structure. This book is a great guide for those thinking about getting into an engineering leadership position, those who have to work with engineering/technology leaders, and those who just landed in a leadership position and are wondering, "What now?". Lessons are drawn on real life experiences and cover topics from development methodologies to dealing with people issues to managing c-levels and the board. It's like having a mentor on your bookshelf to whom you can ask all those questions you were afraid to ask.

In Search of a Group Identity

A new kind of person has evolved in Silicon Valley, and other high-tech hot-spots: the mid-to-high-level technical manager. These people have not learned their jobs by taking courses on it; they have learned their job by doing it. And being in Silicon Valley they have been able to network with kindred souls and discover a group identity.

This is a strange identity: a group consisting of anonymous individuals--a Wiki. These individuals are identified in the end matter, along with the acronyms used--but they cannot be identified in the main text. Perhaps this is typical of this new breed: they are anonymous.

This is in direct contrast with the style of two other popular writers on the subject: Michael Lopp (aka Rands) and Joel Spolsky, who are not even mentioned in the bibliography. They both have active blogs, their own books, and devoted readers (including me). Their style is highly personal; the style for this group is highly impersonal. The two varieties don't seem to mix.

These gentlemen identify themselves with the companies they work for, and their titles of VPE and CTO--not the software community at large. When discussing Open Source, for example, the main emphasis is on what Open Source can do for the company, not so much what the company can do for Open Source. This is true for Corporate Social Responsibility in general: not much is said about the subject, only a few sentences on personal integrity on page 9.

The chapter on Development Methodologies was good, but contained only two links. The Rational Unified Process got such short shrift it shocked me. UML was not mentioned at all. The short section on Personality Types, by contrast, has seven links.

If your goal is to become a VPE/CTO this book would be a good investment for you. If you are more interested in the sociology of software production, Rands would be a better choice.